Join Phi Alpha Delta Legal Fraternity -- Bad Idea?

I guess no one. I mean, this "body language" thing is complete bulls h i t - I know that it's being relied on a lot, by a hell of a lot of LE pros, but they KNOW deep down themselves that that's just not true (that they can actually tell if one's lying using the "behavioral cues" they elicit in their suspects)

When you say "behavioral cues" you mean, like, the subject looked down, or avoided eye contact, stuff like that?

Law professors won't do much overtly, they engage in subtle violence. Often, when we think of violence, we think of the very overt, loud, obvious kind — primarily physical violence, but also in the form of "over the top," very loud, confrontational (and frightening) yelling, screaming or threatening.

But there is also a more subtle and insidious form of "word violence," and this occurs much more frequently because it "goes under the radar" and masks itself as "normal." While it can be easily dismissed or overlooked because of its quieter presentation, it can do serious damage none-the-less, by

1) creating stress2) fostering oppression3) deflating motivation4) curtailing creativity5) eventually leading the way to more overt forms of violence.

In individual interactions, one who uses the power of words in subtly violent ways may be doing so consciously, in a purposeful effort to manipulate, or unconsciously, out of his or her "unexamined Shadow." Examples of subtle "word violence" can show up as malicious gossip, passive-aggression, purposeful withholding, inconsistency, incivility, and bullying, to name a few.

[...]

Withholding draws its power from the imprinting of an authoritarian system, in which people have been trained by more overt communications — including body language — so that ultimately the overt words or facial/body expression are no longer needed in order for the person in the perceived position of authority to manipulate the situation to his or her advantage. [...]

Some parts of the body can be controlled more than others. The easy parts to discipline are those parts whose actions we are most aware of in everyday signaling. [...] The legs and feet are of particular interest because this is the part of the body where people are least aware of what they are doing. [...] Legs and feet are a vital give-away area.

Here it is a very interesting post on "body language" lying kind of thing!

After a verbose preamble, which among other things informs you helpfully that "behavior becomes unacceptable when it infringes on the rights of others," the Code of Conduct of the Public Library of the city where I live provides thirty-one examples of unacceptable conduct. These examples can be sorted into five general categories:

[...] How well does this theory apply to a typical piece of modern bureaucratic regulation? Or the types of behavior the library code prohibits, you might note that only those listed in the first category can be thought to convey useful information to any minimally socialized member of the community. There could be a real reason as to whether you're allowed to bring a bag of pretzels into the library, but do you really require "notice" that you can't snatch purses, expose yourself to patrons, do your laundry in the bathroom, or play high-stakes poker in the reference area? Suppose you hadn't been given notice of any of these things; does it follow you're free to claim as a defense insufficient publicity on the part of the state?

Can there be any non-psychotic person of minimally functional intelligence who would suppose that any of the things on this list, other than those dealt with in the most site-specific regulations, were not prohibited? [...] So here we seem to be faced with a wholly superfluous invocation of legal rules: rules that merely reflect tacit social understandings that themselves have no apparent need to be cast into a public legal text.

[...]

Posting a public notice of the unacceptability of theft, or of exhibitionism, or of physical and sexual abuse, is very much like passing yet another law providing still more penalties for the sale of already illegal drugs. Such actions represent our legal culture's equivalent to the practice of nailing garlic over doorways to repel vampires. In each case a psychological imperative born of a sense of lack of control, and of the fear and anxiety this sensation produces, demands of us that we "do something." Those same factors then lead us to do things that appear in the cold light of rational analysis to be almost wholly irrational.

Funny I read the other day a joke - it kinda illustrates what's talked about here:

Little Johnny is riding a bike to the street corner and he sees a cop riding a horse. The cop asks "Did Santa give you that bike?" and Johnny replies "Yes!" so the cop hands him over a ticket and says, "Here, next year, tell Santa to put lights on it!"

Johnny gets annoyed and asks "Did Santa give you that horse?" The cop plays along by telling him "Yes!" and Johnny tells him "Next year, tell him the d i c k goes under the horse, not on top of it!" and rides off on his bike.

[...] Sartre calls it "bad faith" when you deny the concept of free will by lying to yourself about your self and freedom. This can take many forms, from convincing yourself that some form of determinism is true, to a sort of "mimicry" where you act as "you should." How "one" should act is often determined by an image one has of how one such as oneself (say, a bank manager) acts. This image usually corresponds to some sort of social norm. This does not mean that all acting in accordance with social norms is bad faith: The main point is the attitude you takes to your own freedom, and the extent to which you act in accordance with this freedom. A sign of bad faith can be something like the denial of responsibility for something you have done on the grounds that you just did "as one does" or that your genes determined you to do as you did. Lying to yourself might appear impossible or contradictory. Sartre denies the subconscious the power to do this, and he claims that the person who is lying to himself has to be aware that he is lying - that he isn't determined, or this "thing" he makes himself out to be.

[...] Sartre indeed derides those who act out roles: bourgeoisie with their comfortable sense of 'duty', homosexuals who pretend to be heterosexuals, peeping Toms who get caught in the act of spying and, most famously of all, waiters who rush about. All of these, he says, are slaves to other people's perceptions - 'the Other'. They are exhibiting mauvaise foi -- 'bad faith'. He emphasizes what is not over what is, the latter being a rather humdrum sort of affair consisting of the kind of things that scientists examine, while the 'what is not' is really much more interesting. [...] And hence, we come back to our own natures, our own 'essences'. We exist, yes, but how do we 'define ourselves'? It is here that the waiter comes in:

Quote

His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the hand and arm

This spotlight on 'consciousness' is what made Sartre's name. But, curiously enough [...] his lifelong intellectual confidante and companion Simone de Beauvoir, also describes various kinds of consciousness, in passages ranging from wandering through an empty theater (the stage, the walls, the chairs, unable to come alive until there is an audience) [...] As well as this one:

Quote

It's impossible to believe that other people are conscious beings, aware of their own inward feelings, as we ourselves are aware of our own," said Françoise. "To me, it's terrifying when we grasp that. We get the impression of no longer being anything but a fragment of someone else's mind."

[...] Now who's showing bad faith? Sartre or the waiter?

[...] Truly it is itself a philosophical tale. On the one hand there is the well-known plot of Sartre the womanizer who denies the dutiful Beauvoir the marriage in order to preserve his 'existential freedom'. On the other, and much less known, is the factual history recorded in their letters to one another. This records that, in 1930, Sartre proposed marriage to Beauvoir. She was aghast at this, both for the conventionality of the proposal, and for the conventionality of Sartre's assumptions, and it was she who insisted instead that if they were to spend their years together she wanted to be able to continue to have other relationships (with both male and female lovers).

[...] back to the waiter. Now I've observed waiters too. They often need to perform tasks quickly, for a practical reason, not an optional one related to their 'false consciousness'. The job is skilled -- demanding more than demeaning [...]

That's what happens when people sit all day long in a coffee shop - they would, of course, have nothing else to do but watch waiters come and go!

pobis, that's not the point - I guess the philosopher (Sartre) has chosen the waiter as the better representative of the people who kind of "act" - as you can see from the post there are others he could have commented on and examined in the level of detail they he's doing the "waiter."

The hypertrophied rationalism of American law is a product of trying too hard to be good: of failing to accept that law is always a somewhat crude and potentially destructive social steering mechanism, that works best when it remains a tacit presence in the social background. Instead Americans insist on subjecting themselves to a dictatorship of the bureaucratic: one in which the answer to every important social conflict inevitably involves more rules and procedures, more rights and obligations, more "reasons" and "principled justifications" given in the course of constructing ever-more complex analytic and rhetorical circles for choosing to do this rather than that -- in brief, more law.

The excesses of American rule of ideology are in large part enabled by our unwillingness to accept that reason, when properly employed, works to make its further employment superfluous. Reason, that is, works ironically toward its own effacement. [...] Outside a legal equilibrium zone law tends to be both an invisible and a powerful factor in the maintenance of social cohesion. By contrast within such a zone the inevitable contradictions in the legal rules such situations produce are clearly visible, and as a consequence the rules themselves are rendered relatively useless. Faced with such legal and social contradictions, we can not decide efficiently processed legal disputes on the basis of "reason". We merely decide.

The essential fallacy of legal rationalism is thus to think that what works well in moderation will work even better in large doses. So deep is this belief that when the more extreme manifestations of legal reason fail altogether we tend to manifest a willful blindness to this failure, or we undertake what soon become perverse efforts to perfect systems of rules that, by the nature of the problems they address, can't be perfected. When neither of these strategies work we do what courts often do and simply indulge in magical thinking, assuming, of course, e.g., that because a court ends its opinion with the phrase "it is so ordered," "it" is both going to happen, and to produce a series of predictable social effects.

[...] American law, that is, may well find itself betrayed by its own overweening pride in having succeeded in its quest to bring so much of American life under its sway. As a consequence of the legal system's increasing tendency to deny the true nature of its crucial but relatively modest role as a social coordination and dispute processing mechanism, our law is becoming so elaborate, so hypertrophied, so pointlessly complex, and hence so unnecessarily expensive that alternate modes of getting from here to there on the social map are already springing up all around us. [...] And of course various militant ideologies of the far right serve as disconcerting reminders of how considerably more radical forms of dissent against what is called the rule of law are already simmering.

Like the donkey of the fable who starves to death because he is exactly equidistant from two stacks of hay and therefore can't decide rationally to which stack he should go, we demand dispositive reasons for choosing where there are none. Less principled than the ass, we than "discover" -- at great fiscal and psychological expense -- some answer that must be arrived at more or less arbitrarily, while still insisting that this particular outcome was impelled by the law, or legal principles, or reason itself.

Here it is an interesting post on Americans in general - the way they think, behave and the like - very much in consonance with the prevailing ideology described in the above post. Couldn't be otherwise, after all, America's "philosophy" and ideology was fashioned after of the French Revolution's Illuminism.

Quote

In casual conversation (called "small talk"), Americans prefer to talk about the weather, sports, jobs, people they both know, or past experiences, especially ones they have in common. As they grow up, most US citizens are warned not to discuss politics or religion, at least not with people they do not know rather well, because politics and religion are considered controversial topics. By contrast, people in some other cultures are taught to believe that politics and/or religion are good conversation topics, and they may have different ideas about what topics are too "personal" to discuss with others.

The ideal among Americans is to be somewhat verbally adept, speaking in moderate tones. They are generally taught to believe in the "scientific method" of understanding the world around them, as if there is some kind of "truth" about people and nature that can be discovered by means of "objective" inquiry. People from some other countries might pay more attention to the emotional content or the human feeling aspects of a message, without assuming the existence of an "objective truth."

The result is that Americans are likely to view a very articulate person with suspicion. This is because Americans are not intellectually capable of anything more than simple talk. The conclusion that Americans are intellectually inferior is logically reached when you also consider the fact that Americans do not regard argument as a favorite form of interaction. What US citizens regard favorably as "keeping cool" -- that is, not being drawn into an argument, not raising the voice, looking always for the "facts" is nothing else but coldness and lack of humanness.

pobis, not surprisingly, here I find another post describing a bit the American mentality, stressing on the Puritan/Calvinist inheritance as well:

Quote

[...] The Puritan mind reasons: "Well of course the witch doesn't want to be saved from her own evil. That's why we must save her from herself by burning her at the stake." Sounds absurd, but that American major said after the destruction of the village of Ben Tre in Vietnam: "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." A true Puritan there. [...] Think Fallujah. We're burning the country at the stake. It's a form of mental illness, but it's a sickness we all accept as normal.

Terrorism is the latest encounter of the Puritan mind with the irrational, and the traditional Islamic culture that promotes it will just have to be destroyed to save it. World politics will be so much more hygienic once we exterminate the vermin. [...] A key element in understanding the Calvinist mentality is its need for control and its willingness to use whatever level of violence necessary to repress the "irrational" elements in human experience, and the pre-modern in the Puritan demonology is full of irrational images triggering fears in need of suppression—magic, witches, Catholic ritual, shifty Jews, hot-tempered Italians, voodoo practicing Africans, the savage Indian.

Theirs is a tight, priggish, white-bread, control-obsessed world, sterilized of anything that suggests mystery, transcendence, or the non-rational in general. The Puritans and their Calvinist cousins the Scotch Irish, of course, didn't invent priggishness, nor are they, obviously, the only ones in the history of humanity who have justified the violent repression of their enemies for religious reasons. But theirs is the peculiarly modern form for the religious persecution of the enemy, and it lingers in Anglo-American culture, and is so much in the cultural air we breathe that we cannot see it clearly. At the very heart of modern "religiosity," whether in its Calvinist or its more secular versions, is fear of the uncontrollable non-rational.

The American right's fear of communism/socialism is more akin to the Islamic fear of modernity, which is the fear of an uncontrollable future. If fascism derives its mystique from a mythological past, communism derives it from a mythologized future. Progressives look to the future. Conservatives look to the past. Progressives distrust the past and its pre-modern irrationality; Conservatives distrust those who look to the future with an irrational utopianism. Progressivism is experiencing hard times these days because during a culturally decadent period like the one we're currently suffering through, we don't know what to hope for. We have only the weakest sense of plausible future possibility. We are capable of seeing the future only as a variation on 'more of the same', and that is not a vision that inspires concerted action. [...]

[...] Sartre calls it "bad faith" when you deny the concept of free will by lying to yourself about your self and freedom. This can take many forms, from convincing yourself that some form of determinism is true, to a sort of "mimicry" where you act as "you should." How "one" should act is often determined by an image one has of how one such as oneself (say, a bank manager) acts. This image usually corresponds to some sort of social norm. This does not mean that all acting in accordance with social norms is bad faith: The main point is the attitude you takes to your own freedom, and the extent to which you act in accordance with this freedom. A sign of bad faith can be something like the denial of responsibility for something you have done on the grounds that you just did "as one does" or that your genes determined you to do as you did. Lying to yourself might appear impossible or contradictory. Sartre denies the subconscious the power to do this, and he claims that the person who is lying to himself has to be aware that he is lying - that he isn't determined, or this "thing" he makes himself out to be.

[...] Sartre indeed derides those who act out roles: bourgeoisie with their comfortable sense of 'duty', homosexuals who pretend to be heterosexuals, peeping Toms who get caught in the act of spying and, most famously of all, waiters who rush about. All of these, he says, are slaves to other people's perceptions - 'the Other'. They are exhibiting mauvaise foi -- 'bad faith'. He emphasizes what is not over what is, the latter being a rather humdrum sort of affair consisting of the kind of things that scientists examine, while the 'what is not' is really much more interesting. [...] And hence, we come back to our own natures, our own 'essences'. We exist, yes, but how do we 'define ourselves'? It is here that the waiter comes in:

Quote

His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the hand and arm

This spotlight on 'consciousness' is what made Sartre's name. But, curiously enough [...] his lifelong intellectual confidante and companion Simone de Beauvoir, also describes various kinds of consciousness, in passages ranging from wandering through an empty theater (the stage, the walls, the chairs, unable to come alive until there is an audience) [...] As well as this one:

Quote

It's impossible to believe that other people are conscious beings, aware of their own inward feelings, as we ourselves are aware of our own," said Françoise. "To me, it's terrifying when we grasp that. We get the impression of no longer being anything but a fragment of someone else's mind."

[...] Now who's showing bad faith? Sartre or the waiter?

[...] Truly it is itself a philosophical tale. On the one hand there is the well-known plot of Sartre the womanizer who denies the dutiful Beauvoir the marriage in order to preserve his 'existential freedom'. On the other, and much less known, is the factual history recorded in their letters to one another. This records that, in 1930, Sartre proposed marriage to Beauvoir. She was aghast at this, both for the conventionality of the proposal, and for the conventionality of Sartre's assumptions, and it was she who insisted instead that if they were to spend their years together she wanted to be able to continue to have other relationships (with both male and female lovers).

[...] back to the waiter. Now I've observed waiters too. They often need to perform tasks quickly, for a practical reason, not an optional one related to their 'false consciousness'. The job is skilled -- demanding more than demeaning [...]

That's what happens when people sit all day long in a coffee shop - they would, of course, have nothing else to do but watch waiters come and go!

pobis, that's not the point - I guess the philosopher (Sartre) has chosen the waiter as the better representative of the people who kind of "act" - as you can see from the post there are others he could have commented on and examined in the level of detail they he's doing the "waiter."

How about actors? Couldn't he have chosen the actor to describe for us this "unauthenticity" thing?!

[...] Sartre indeed derides those who act out roles: bourgeoisie with their comfortable sense of 'duty', homosexuals who pretend to be heterosexuals, peeping Toms who get caught in the act of spying and, most famously of all, waiters who rush about. All of these, he says, are slaves to other people's perceptions - 'the Other'. They are exhibiting mauvaise foi -- 'bad faith'. He emphasizes what is not over what is, the latter being a rather humdrum sort of affair consisting of the kind of things that scientists examine, while the 'what is not' is really much more interesting. [...] And hence, we come back to our own natures, our own 'essences'. We exist, yes, but how do we 'define ourselves'? It is here that the waiter comes in:

Quote

His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the hand and arm

This spotlight on 'consciousness' is what made Sartre's name. But, curiously enough [...] his lifelong intellectual confidante and companion Simone de Beauvoir, also describes various kinds of consciousness, in passages ranging from wandering through an empty theater (the stage, the walls, the chairs, unable to come alive until there is an audience) [...] As well as this one:

Quote

It's impossible to believe that other people are conscious beings, aware of their own inward feelings, as we ourselves are aware of our own," said Françoise. "To me, it's terrifying when we grasp that. We get the impression of no longer being anything but a fragment of someone else's mind."

[...] Now who's showing bad faith? Sartre or the waiter?

[...] Truly it is itself a philosophical tale. On the one hand there is the well-known plot of Sartre the womanizer who denies the dutiful Beauvoir the marriage in order to preserve his 'existential freedom'. On the other, and much less known, is the factual history recorded in their letters to one another. This records that, in 1930, Sartre proposed marriage to Beauvoir. She was aghast at this, both for the conventionality of the proposal, and for the conventionality of Sartre's assumptions, and it was she who insisted instead that if they were to spend their years together she wanted to be able to continue to have other relationships (with both male and female lovers).

[...] back to the waiter. Now I've observed waiters too. They often need to perform tasks quickly, for a practical reason, not an optional one related to their 'false consciousness'. The job is skilled -- demanding more than demeaning [...]

That's what happens when people sit all day long in a coffee shop - they would, of course, have nothing else to do but watch waiters come and go!

pobis, that's not the point - I guess the philosopher (Sartre) has chosen the waiter as the better representative of the people who kind of "act" - as you can see from the post there are others he could have commented on and examined in the level of detail they he's doing the "waiter."

How about actors? Couldn't he have chosen the actor to describe for us this "inauthenticity" thing?!

Just a suggestion, yanno!

That would be too obvious - I mean, of course, actors are "acting" - don't you think?!

[...] Sartre indeed derides those who act out roles: bourgeoisie with their comfortable sense of 'duty', homosexuals who pretend to be heterosexuals, peeping Toms who get caught in the act of spying and, most famously of all, waiters who rush about. All of these, he says, are slaves to other people's perceptions - 'the Other'. They are exhibiting mauvaise foi -- 'bad faith'. He emphasizes what is not over what is, the latter being a rather humdrum sort of affair consisting of the kind of things that scientists examine, while the 'what is not' is really much more interesting. [...] And hence, we come back to our own natures, our own 'essences'. We exist, yes, but how do we 'define ourselves'? It is here that the waiter comes in:

Quote

His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the hand and arm

This spotlight on 'consciousness' is what made Sartre's name. But, curiously enough [...] his lifelong intellectual confidante and companion Simone de Beauvoir, also describes various kinds of consciousness, in passages ranging from wandering through an empty theater (the stage, the walls, the chairs, unable to come alive until there is an audience) [...] As well as this one:

Quote

It's impossible to believe that other people are conscious beings, aware of their own inward feelings, as we ourselves are aware of our own," said Françoise. "To me, it's terrifying when we grasp that. We get the impression of no longer being anything but a fragment of someone else's mind."

[...] Now who's showing bad faith? Sartre or the waiter?

[...] Truly it is itself a philosophical tale. On the one hand there is the well-known plot of Sartre the womanizer who denies the dutiful Beauvoir the marriage in order to preserve his 'existential freedom'. On the other, and much less known, is the factual history recorded in their letters to one another. This records that, in 1930, Sartre proposed marriage to Beauvoir. She was aghast at this, both for the conventionality of the proposal, and for the conventionality of Sartre's assumptions, and it was she who insisted instead that if they were to spend their years together she wanted to be able to continue to have other relationships (with both male and female lovers).

[...] back to the waiter. Now I've observed waiters too. They often need to perform tasks quickly, for a practical reason, not an optional one related to their 'false consciousness'. The job is skilled -- demanding more than demeaning [...]

That's what happens when people sit all day long in a coffee shop - they would, of course, have nothing else to do but watch waiters come and go!

pobis, that's not the point - I guess the philosopher (Sartre) has chosen the waiter as the better representative of the people who kind of "act" - as you can see from the post there are others he could have commented on and examined in the level of detail they he's doing the "waiter."

How about actors? Couldn't he have chosen the actor to describe for us this "inauthenticity" thing?!

Just a suggestion, yanno!

That would be too obvious - I mean, of course, actors are "acting" - don't you think?!

Funny that you mention this Mauvaise Foi thing, Tahiri - or whoever started with it at the beginning

I'm sure you all remember the famous Café de Flore in Paris where Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus used to hang out together. And then, all of a sudden, there's this split; over fundamental issues, I tend to believe.

There's actually a post on the "Asylum" thread by CoQ10 dealing a lil' bit with the particular differences between the two (I can't quote it directly, for reasons that we are all aware by now).

You see, Sartre was complaining why people couldn't properly be what they choose to be, deploring any kind of "acting" on their part, and wanted them to be truthful to the core, so to speak.

Camus, on the other side, came a little by little, to believe that basically people can (but not necessarily so, as Sartre maintained) create meaning in their lives, and thus have something for which to strive in life.

As both believe that there's no such thing as "meaning," or "value" in life, the whole point of debate is as to whether the pursuit of the "constructed" meaning (on the part of man) is a futile gesture or not. Sartre is dead serious about it, as you read above.

But Camus, introduces a quite curious term, he says that whatever people do, they should take care that they don't overdo it, or fully identify with that thing they're doing. According to him, they must always maintain an ironic distance between this invented meaning and the knowledge of the absurd (otherwise one runs the risk of losing from one's perspective what one's really is, beginning to think they really stand for this invented, fictitious meaning they've themselves constructed).

[...] Sartre indeed derides those who act out roles: bourgeoisie with their comfortable sense of 'duty', homosexuals who pretend to be heterosexuals, peeping Toms who get caught in the act of spying and, most famously of all, waiters who rush about. All of these, he says, are slaves to other people's perceptions - 'the Other'. They are exhibiting mauvaise foi -- 'bad faith'. He emphasizes what is not over what is, the latter being a rather humdrum sort of affair consisting of the kind of things that scientists examine, while the 'what is not' is really much more interesting. [...] And hence, we come back to our own natures, our own 'essences'. We exist, yes, but how do we 'define ourselves'? It is here that the waiter comes in:

Quote

His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the hand and arm

This spotlight on 'consciousness' is what made Sartre's name. But, curiously enough [...] his lifelong intellectual confidante and companion Simone de Beauvoir, also describes various kinds of consciousness, in passages ranging from wandering through an empty theater (the stage, the walls, the chairs, unable to come alive until there is an audience) [...] As well as this one:

[...] Now who's showing bad faith? Sartre or the waiter?

[...] Truly it is itself a philosophical tale. On the one hand there is the well-known plot of Sartre the womanizer who denies the dutiful Beauvoir the marriage in order to preserve his 'existential freedom'. On the other, and much less known, is the factual history recorded in their letters to one another. This records that, in 1930, Sartre proposed marriage to Beauvoir. She was aghast at this, both for the conventionality of the proposal, and for the conventionality of Sartre's assumptions, and it was she who insisted instead that if they were to spend their years together she wanted to be able to continue to have other relationships (with both male and female lovers).

[...] back to the waiter. Now I've observed waiters too. They often need to perform tasks quickly, for a practical reason, not an optional one related to their 'false consciousness'. The job is skilled -- demanding more than demeaning [...]

Funny that you mention this Mauvaise Foi thing, Tahiri - or whoever started with it at the beginning

I'm sure you all remember the famous Café de Flore in Paris where Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus used to hang out together. And then, all of a sudden, there's this split; over fundamental issues, I tend to believe.

There's actually a post on the "Asylum" thread by CoQ10 dealing a lil' bit with the particular differences between the two (I can't quote it directly, for reasons that we are all aware by now).

You see, Sartre was complaining why people couldn't properly be what they choose to be, deploring any kind of "acting" on their part, and wanted them to be truthful to the core, so to speak.

Camus, on the other side, came a little by little, to believe that basically people can (but not necessarily so, as Sartre maintained) create meaning in their lives, and thus have something for which to strive in life.

As both believe that there's no such thing as "meaning," or "value" in life, the whole point of debate is as to whether the pursuit of the "constructed" meaning (on the part of man) is a futile gesture or not. Sartre is dead serious about it, as you read above.

But Camus, introduces a quite curious term, he says that whatever people do, they should take care that they don't overdo it, or fully identify with that thing they're doing. According to him, they must always maintain an ironic distance between this invented meaning and the knowledge of the absurd (otherwise one runs the risk of losing from one's perspective what one's really is, beginning to think they really stand for this invented, fictitious meaning they've themselves constructed).

Take a look at this post - I deliberately chose it for the use of 'active' and 'passive' terms - please comment on, if you feel you've smth to say related to.